Abhijit Athavale's Blog

In this series, I plan to take you, dear reader, through the complete process of SEO. We will create a hypothetical company with hypothetical products that are based in reality. I certainly hope that it will encourage more people to embrace this freely available marketing resource with the widest reach. Let's call our company Mirella - a fabless telecom chip maker. Doesn't the name and logo look cool? I created it using a service called Namelix that uses AI to generate business names.  Since Mirella is entirely a figment of our imagination, we need to make sure that it has some products to sell to the Imaginarium. To do that, I looked at some interesting startups in the 5G space and name that I have zeroed in on is EdgeQ . It's a 5G+AI chip startup building base stations on a chip. Importantly, they have a functioning website, which is needed to run not only a technical audit, but is also a starting point for keyword research and analysis. We will have to perform a technica...

I have been watching the nascent AI Processor market with interest - it's a brand new opportunity for semiconductors to address applications that didn't exist before. Here's a good primer  from McKinsey. Mythic, a hot AI processor startup that raised $160+ Mn has unfortunately run out of money before reaching revenue. Mythic chips and eval boards have been available for over a year now, so one wonders if they were not able to generate enough demand. It will be impossible to know exactly what went wrong from the outside looking in, but it still is an interesting exercise to take a look at their demand creation activities, specifically SEO, which by its very nature is public. SEO is a great sidekick to the traditional strategic marketing/business development activities and exhibits tremendous long tail effects. First thing to do is to start looking for possible keywords/key phrases that prospects (customers, partners, job seekers) are using to frame their Google searches. In ...

Previously, we established the fact that customers are searching for high-tech products using Google,  here . Today, I will show you how to tie that keyword search to qualified leads and real revenue for your company. If you demonstrate to your management that the investments in SEO are translating into more qualified leads and revenue, you will be considered as a legend in your company. How do we do that? It's not hard, but you have to put in some effort and give it time. Before we begin, let's look at the concept of search intent. Search intent is the goal that a user has when searching for something/anything online, and Google very much cares about search intent. You should care too because identifying search intent gives you direct access to prospects at different stages of the sales funnel.  Search intent is broadly classified into four types: informational, commercial, transactional, navigational.  Informational intent is where the user is looking for information Co...

How much should a technology company pay for SEO? In other words, what should be my SEO budget as a technology company? This perhaps is the wrong question to ask because it really depends. If you Google this and peruse through the top links, you are going to get various articles that reach the conclusions I have outlined below: $1000 per month offers are generally not a good idea. These agencies do all sorts of tactics to raise your rankings, but there is a good chance that your domain may land in trouble with Google. Most reputable agencies with above board SEO practices will charge you between $3K to $5K per month. And this seems to be a price point that most online articles are converging on. I also agree that this is pretty much the sweet spot. Obviously, this figure is going to change if you are a colossal business with a zillion products and web properties. You may also see something called thought leadership SEO that runs upwards of $7K per month. Frankly, this offer makes no se...

  Following up on this post from last week where I talked about how to high tech marketers can  justify investments in SEO  to their management,  here's some more macro data that you can use. Embedded links point to source. SEO services market is expected to grow to  $103Bn by 2025 . Quality SEO can reduce the  cost of customer acquisition by 87% . Organic search accounts for 53% of the traffic  brands receive on average. SEO leads  have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate. The measured  click-through-rate  is for a business with the #1 organic position on Google is a whopping 31.7%. The average click-through-rate for a regular search ad is only  1.91% . The average click-through rate for an SMS text is around  19.3% . The average click-through rate for an email is  4.2%  per mailchimp. Do let me know if you are looking for some other data and I will try to find it for you.

I get this question quite a lot from the high tech marketing professionals that I interact with. "Our management does not believe that our customers are using Google to search for our products and services. They think it only works if you are selling toothpaste and the like. It's an uphill battle for us to convince them to start investing in SEO." Well first off, SEO is free and you pay nothing to Google to get more traffic and leads - estimated CTR for a keyword ranked #1 on Google is 34.2%. Secondly, if you have the skills, you can do it yourselves. Even if you hire a highly qualified SEO, you are still getting a fantastic deal - the revenue you will generate over the long term will be orders of magnitude larger than your SEO's fees. Getting back, you have to tell your management that it's just plain wrong. There's an easy way to show them what they are missing: 1. Go to Google and type in the name of your product or service and see who's ranking. Are yo...